The 7 Ballsiest Pranks You Won't Believe Actually Worked

So what would have been a minor, quickly forgotten event instead made international headlines, since everyone realized that only the lack of a camera on his phone saved the two DJs from getting a retaliatory photo of Castro's balls. The FCC fined the radio station $4,000, which is apparently the fine for provoking a communist leader into insulting your sexuality.

Back in 1980, a local news station in Boston decided to pull the classic April Fools' joke, "Make People Flee in Fear for Their Lives."

The station reported that a volcano near Milton, Massachusetts was erupting, and the announcement was complete with stock footage of lava and a statement by then-President Carter, assembled with sound bites.

The very end of the report revealed the truth, but by that point most viewers in Milton were already trying to escape a fiery death, calling the authorities before abandoning their homes.

The producer behind the prank was fired, and the FCC got on their case for "showing library film footage without identifying it as such," which is FCC code for "What the fuck were you guys thinking?"

You know what their prank was missing? An actual, physical, simulated volcano eruption.

Maybe they should have learned from Sitka, Alaska resident Porky Bickar, who, six years earlier, managed to pull off a much more elaborate and better thought out prank. On April Fools' Day, he used a rented helicopter to carry a hundred old tires, rags, fuel, oil and smoke bombs to an actual volcano a few miles away, where he wrote "April Fool" in giant letters in the snow before setting all of that shit on fire.

Of course, from a few miles away his letters weren't visible, all residents saw was a column of fucking black smoke drifting up from the local fucking volcano. Residents of Sitka were understandably terrified, also fleeing their homes and calling the authorities.

We know what you're thinking: When a wacky prank gets pulled, the cops are immediately going to go looking for the guy named "Porky." But here's the twist: They already knew about it.

Porky had cleared his prank with the local police and the FAA ahead of time, who told him to go for it. Yes, the 70s were a different time, kids. An awesome time.

What would you do if a stranger came up and offered to buy you a new wardrobe?

Under normal circumstances you'd probably back away slowly or go for your pepper spray, since the alternative almost certainly involves starring in some videos that will shame you and your family forever. But if you were hearing it at a clothing store, from a woman who rolled up in a limo and claimed she'd just won the lottery, then you might be a little more receptive.

Well, that's exactly what happened at a Burlington Coat Factory in Columbus, Ohio, where a woman named Linda Brown went to the cash register and announced she would pay for everyone's purchases.

Customers predictably reacted to this generous offer by grabbing all the shit they could get their hands on, as well as calling friends and family members to come get a piece of the charity action. The result was that 500 people crammed into the store, along with up to three times as many outside trying to get in. Oh, and two dozen police officers also showed up to try to control the crowd and/or score some sweet new coats.

After about an hour of letting people shop, Brown hopped into her limo and disappeared. People stood around a bit, figuring she just headed to the bank to bring back some suitcases full of cash.

She never came back.

So, like mature, responsible adults, they accepted the fact that they had been tricked and went on with their lives. And by that we mean they rioted, damaged the store and ran off with tons of unpaid-for merchandise, which they figured was now theirs since a stranger who was not associated with the sellers in any way had told them they could have it.

As for Brown, no, she wasn't a millionaire, and the limo was rented. It turned out that it was hard for a pretend millionaire to pay for even a rented limo, so she was turned into the police. At least she got to travel there in style.

This is the prank that turned into one of the longest running jokes in history.

If Hollywood has taught us anything, it's that all the coolest pranks are pulled at college. Students go to college not for the academics but for the chance to commit wacky hijinks and finally get that mean old dean, possibly with the aid of a goat or a large number of bras. Needless to say, those of us who were raised by 80s movies were extremely disappointed when we went to college and discovered that the average prank involved waiting for a dude to pass out and then drawing dongs on his face.

The truly elaborate shenanigans seem to exist only in the movies. But that's only because so few pranksters these days possess the perseverance and apparently limitless spare time of one William Edgar Smith, a Georgia Tech student from 1927. Though maybe we shouldn't be surprised by the spare time thing considering he had no Internet, TV, video games or legal alcohol available to him, and only the most primitive forms of pornography.

What he did have was an extra copy of the school's enrollment form, that had been sent to him by mistake.

Smith signed up a fictitious student by the name of George P. Burdell and enrolled him for all of the same classes Smith was in. Then he proceeded to do this fictional student's course work, in addition to his own. For the entire time he was in school.

To keep up the ruse, Smith would change up both the wording and the handwriting for a second copy of every single assignment, just to make it look legit. On exam day, same thing--in the time allotted to the rest of the students to take the exam once, Smith would do it once for himself and then knock out a second copy for his imaginary friend. Just for the pure hell of it.

Of course, this being a prominent university and full of smart people, it didn't take faculty long to catch on. Well, unless you consider the time it took the fictional student to earn a Bachelor's Degree to be a long time. Because he did just that. It was only upon graduation that the story broke and the university realized they had awarded a degree to the equivalent of Russell Crowe's imaginary roommate in A Beautiful Mind.

That was just the beginning of Burdell's career, however. The fake student stunt immediately became legendary at Georgia Tech, and other students kept turning in work for him until he earned his Master's Degree. Later, jokers in the military would list Burdell as one of the crew members on their bombers, and MAD magazine for years would claim he sat on their Board of Directors. In 2000, some wise guy declared him to be an alternate delegate to the Democratic National Convention.

In 2001, he was in the lead for TIME magazine's Man of the Year before they yanked him from contention and told the pranksters to just fucking give it up already because the joke was 70 years past its comedy expiration date. If only they understood that when a running joke runs long enough, it becomes funny again.

There are some artists that are so famous that everyone's heard of them, even people without the slightest interest in the art world. Michelangelo, da Vinci, Rembrandt, Nat Tate, Monet...

What's that? You've never heard of Nat Tate? Well congratulations, because by admitting that you have more credibility than a lot of people who make a living in the art industry.

Back in 1998, author William Boyd wrote a biography of Tate, an abstract painter who lived from 1928 to 1960. Tate was a troubled genius, who created brilliant paintings but eventually destroyed them all before committing suicide. The book included photographs of Tate and his work, as well as recollections about the man by other famous artists. Oh yeah, and the whole thing was a hoax.

The book was intended as a satire of the New York art community, but Boyd wasn't content to stop at that. He recruited the one group of people with more spare time and boredom on their hands than even our Georgia Tech student up there: celebrities.

He called up Gore Vidal, who promoted and endorsed the book and the claim of it being true, and David Bowie, who arranged a huge launch party for the book in New York on April Fools' Day. Invited were famous artists, collectors, historians and dealers.

So with that many experts on art in one place the scam was quickly revealed, right? Not quite. As Bowie read excerpts from the book everyone nodded sagely and talked about their familiarity with Tate's work.

Only a single newspaper editor realized it was a joke, because he was the only one who would admit to having never heard of Tate. So he did some real in-depth investigation and uncovered the truth. By which we mean he flipped through the book and discovered it had obvious flaws, like using names of supposedly famous art galleries which didn't actually exist.

The hoax made international headlines, the world had a good laugh at the too proud art community and David Bowie went back to leaving flaming bags of his shit on his neighbors' porches.

Families of victims were thrilled when a representative of Dow Chemical, the owner of the plant, appeared on BBC News and finally claimed full responsibility for the disaster. He announced that Dow would be liquidating $12 billion worth of assets to help pay for medical costs, clean-up and research into the dangers of their industry.

It was an amazing corporate gesture, and immediately created a huge stir in the business world. And, of course, it was bullshit. The Dow representative was actually Andy Bichlbaum, a member of a group called The Yes Men, who have a history of doing just this kind of thing. Of course, nobody realized that while he was chatting away with a BBC reporter, particularly the people holding Dow stock. When it looks like a company is claiming to be responsible for the deaths of thousands of people but planning to make up for it by giving away billions of dollars, well, that has a bit of an impact on the markets.

Compounding things, of course, was the fact that when the real Dow issued a press release saying that they did not in fact have any plans to help the sick people, it was pretty much impossible to clear things up without looking like jerks.

By the time the whole affair was sorted out, the fake announcement had made international headlines and Dow stock plummeted in value by $2 billion. Billion. With a "B."

All because some guy at the BBC couldn't check some fucking credentials.

One of the largest scale and most expensive pranks in human history was kept secret for 50 years. The perpetrators were a team of artists in the U.S. Army, and the victim was Hitler. And what they did was more ridiculous than anything the zaniest of movie fraternities could have come up with.

After the American military landed in France after D-Day, they faced a German war machine that by this time was good and pissed off. Borrowing something straight out of Wile E. Coyote's playbook, they set out to baffle the Nazis with a completely separate army armed with nothing but fake inflatable tanks and other bullshit.

What the Germans thought was a 30,000-man armored battalion was in fact a thousand artists (mostly art students recruited for the task) wearing fake uniforms, sending out fictional battle reports over the radio (complete with a war sound effects record playing in the background) all while trying to keep their tanks from getting knocked over by the wind.

They would then intentionally do a half-assed job of covering their tracks, so that German planes and scouts would spot them and report back about this huge-ass army waiting at the location. The Germans had to completely rethink their battle plan each time, while the real American forces were sneaking around, raising hell somewhere else.

How convincing were they? Well, it's thought they saved up to 30,000 allied lives purely with the power of bullshit. Oh, and some German units even surrendered to them. Which must have been pretty humiliating when they were marched past an armored division they could have taken out with a sharp stick.

You can read more from Mark at Gunaxin.

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For more cases of ridiculous deceit, check out The 5 Ballsiest Lies Ever Passed off as Journalism and 6 People Who Faked Their Own Death (For Ridiculous Reasons).

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